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The dealing directly with the simplest human wants may have been responsible for an impression which I carried about with me almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a visit to Tolstoy that the Settlement, or Hull-House at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse "to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard labor and scant fare.
There must be some good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club instead of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity of revenge.
It is issuing Chukovsky's edition of Nekrasov, reprints of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Turgenev, and books by Professor Timiriazev, Karl Pearson and others of a scientific character, besides the complete works of Lenin's old rival, Plekhanov.
Sent out by his Chicago paper, he was going to Russia to see a whole people fight to be free a struggle prophesied long ago by Turgenief, Tolstoy and other big Russians whose work I admired. And now it was actually coming off and Joe, the lucky devil, was going to be right on hand!
Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three there is a touch of the sublime naïveté of childhood's outpourings. I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century.
It is an effect of slow and inevitable change, drawn out in minute detail through two lives, with all the others that cluster round each exactly the kind of matter that nobody but Tolstoy, with his huge hand, would think of trying to treat scenically.
This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less the animating power of the noble epic, "War and Peace," and of his peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive Slav vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian scenery not merely with beauty, but with spiritual significance.
To remedy these evils, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who was regarded as a pillar of Conservatism, was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, with the mission of protecting the young generation against pernicious ideas, and eradicating from the schools, colleges, and universities all revolutionary tendencies.
Naturally, such men accepted the Emperor's jest as a compliment, and perpetuated its memory. This style of carriage, which I have already described in my account of our visit to Count Tolstoy, is a development of the Russian racing-gig, which is also used for rough driving in the country, by landed proprietors.
Tolstoy says that the words of Christ to His friends and pupils have had a hundred thousand times more influence over the people than all the poems, odes, elegies and elegant epistles of the authors of that age.
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